The collection of articles presented in this special issue of the Journal of English Linguistics is the first of its kind as a thematically and methodologically coherent set of contributions dealing with the diachronic dimension of the grammar of postcolonial varieties of English. To date, the bulk of descriptive World Englishes research has consisted of synchronic comparisons of the lexico-grammar of the parent variety and Postcolonial Englishes, often accounting for the present-day differences in contactlinguistic and language-acquisitional terms, or with reference to certain “universals of New Englishes” or “angloversals” (Mair 2003). Barring a number of forerunners (e.g., Fritz 2007; Dollinger 2008; Hundt & Szmrecsanyi 2012; Rossouw & van Rooy 2012), the grammars of contemporary postcolonial varieties have not been considered from a historical linguistic perspective, as stages in their own evolution. Indeed, such a research focus remains unmentioned in Bolton’s (2005) survey article on World Englishes research. Nor is historical linguistics mentioned by Schneider (2003:236) as one of the linguistic subdisciplines that the study of “world-wide Englishes” builds on, in spite of the fact that it “should . . . be most obvious” that “the sociolinguistic and linguistic scenarios in which New Englishes have evolved lend themselves to an investigation of . . . language variation and change” (Schneider 2003:238). While the historical investigation of any sociocultural phenomenon is hardly in need of further justification, the arrival on the scene of World Englishes scholarship of Schneider’s (2003) own “dynamic model” of the emergence of New Englishes has made the need for historical linguistic investigation of such varieties all the more pressing. As a hypothesis of a “diachronic process” (Schneider 2003:235), the model very much remains in need of empirical underpinning, in particular with relation to
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